What's your favorite Linux Distro and why?

[Tirbyren]

I've used several forms of Linux before, and am considering using it again. I decided I'd like to know what you guys like to use and why :)

[Arkaine23]

Gentoo because of portage and it's lightweight base install.

But a close second is Knoppix because its so easy to use and versatile. Sometimes running off a CD comes in very handy.

And then there's jollix, which is the best of both ^, but I've gotta translate the installation instructions and use it a bit more before I fully endorse it. And then I'll have to customize it and reburn the Live CD for it to be perfect.

My opinions stem from experience in the following:

Gentoo, Knoppix and a few of its spin-offs, Debian, Redhat, and Mandrake.

[Tirbyren]

Hmm, I was just looking at the overclockix which is basiclly a supped up Knoppix isn't it? It looks very nice.

[fiji]

gentoo, because of portage

[kaltag]

Personally I hate Gentoo BECAUSE of portage. I've used Debian, slackware9, mandrake 9.1 and red hat 9. So far my favorite is slackware. It was a very straight forward install and is very fast. I like red hat except that it's full of junk I didn't need and runs a bit slow for my liking. My 1.6 Celeron with slackware runs circles around my 2.4 P4 with Red hat.

[SickBoy]

kaltag - what is it about portage that bothers you?

portage is a super nice feature IMHO. I have a FreeBSD 5.1 box at work and I like their equivalent, the ports collection. Gentoo was actually created by a FreeBSD developer who wanted something similar. One of the major drawbacks of portage and ports, though, is installing any software not covered by the GPL. When you can automatically download and install software without being forced to read/agree to a EULA, things get complicated. (My two experiences: WineX and the Cirtix ICA client)

FreeBSD ports/packages system also has a quick way to install binary packages from the internet without having to compile everything first - which would be nice for some things in Gentoo. Sometimes you just need something quick and don't feel like waiting for it to compile with all your optimizations. It just goes out and fetches a generic i386 precompiled binary (or grabs it from CD). Gentoo needs a feature like this IMHO.

[UnseenMenace]

I personally like SuSE... as for all the newbie distro's SuSE iappears to be the most togeather.. the support offered on this distro and its features area amazing... not to mention it has great Apt-Get Support

[moorcito]

Slackware, of course. I like it because, it's easy, and straighforward to install, the init scripts aren't located in a bunch of wierd directorys (like RH and the like), there are not any "cool" GUI configuration utilities meaning that you have to edit all you config files which gives you greater control and understanding over your box, and while you can use the Slackware package manager to install precompiled software packages, compiling and installing by hand is much more fun.

[ucfswimmer]

Gentoo because of the way it's geared towards performance and customization and also because of portage :D

~jeff~

[baldmonk]

i'm currently running debian, but about to give gentoo a try. not cuz debian isn't good, it's a very good distro imho, it cuz a lot of ppl are using gentoo, and reccommend it.

[DarkArctic]

Another Gentoo fan here.

I like portage, the rc-update and etc-update tools are excellent. Also the bare install and the optimizations are good to have.

-DarkArctic

[mirko_3]

gentoo, because of portage, and because I overclock!! and yes, rc-update is great, etc-update a bit less, but I use a cfg-update script that i downloaded from the gentoo forums which uses xxdiff, it's great!
Seriously, after trying portage, I don't think I could live without it... always updating my system... :D

[stamasd]

Slackware, all the Slackware and nothing but the Slackware. :)

Because of the BSD-style init scripts, and because it's a hands-on distro that you can make do EXACTLY what you want it to do.

[Cowboy Shane]

Originally posted by stamasd
Slackware, all the Slackware and nothing but the Slackware. :)

Because of the BSD-style init scripts, and because it's a hands-on distro that you can make do EXACTLY what you want it to do.
Ditto. Count me with the other Slack supporters. I've tried Gentoo, Redhat, Suse, Mandrake, Debian, ELX, Lycoris, Xandros, and just about any other linux distro you can name, but I keep coming back to Slackware.

[kaltag]

Originally posted by SickBoy
kaltag - what is it about portage that bothers you?

portage is a super nice feature IMHO. I have a FreeBSD 5.1 box at work and I like their equivalent, the ports collection. Gentoo was actually created by a FreeBSD developer who wanted something similar. One of the major drawbacks of portage and ports, though, is installing any software not covered by the GPL. When you can automatically download and install software without being forced to read/agree to a EULA, things get complicated. (My two experiences: WineX and the Cirtix ICA client)

FreeBSD ports/packages system also has a quick way to install binary packages from the internet without having to compile everything first - which would be nice for some things in Gentoo. Sometimes you just need something quick and don't feel like waiting for it to compile with all your optimizations. It just goes out and fetches a generic i386 precompiled binary (or grabs it from CD). Gentoo needs a feature like this IMHO.
In my experience of using it portage has been EXTREMELY slow and if you end up downloading a corrupted a file oops there go es everythying. I prefer to install from tarball because I can check the md5sum to make sure I got the complete and correct file. I also don't like the install process (although it did teach me a ton in the process :D). Slackware was just very straight forward and to the point and things are organized very logically. I will say however that apt is an awesome feature in debian (so I hear) because the harddrive with my very limited debian install went bottom up so I never got a chance to really try it out.

[DarkArctic]

Originally posted by kaltag

In my experience of using it portage has been EXTREMELY slow and if you end up downloading a corrupted a file oops there go es everythying. I prefer to install from tarball because I can check the md5sum to make sure I got the complete and correct file. I also don't like the install process (although it did teach me a ton in the process :D). Slackware was just very straight forward and to the point and things are organized very logically. I will say however that apt is an awesome feature in debian (so I hear) because the harddrive with my very limited debian install went bottom up so I never got a chance to really try it out.

Just to point something out. Portage does do a md5sum on every package and lets you know whether it's corrupted or not. I'd really like to check out Slack and Debian but I haven't got the spare space to do so.

-DarkArctic

[SickBoy]

Originally posted by DarkArctic


Just to point something out. Portage does do a md5sum on every package and lets you know whether it's corrupted or not. I'd really like to check out Slack and Debian but I haven't got the spare space to do so.

-DarkArctic

I was gonna say, I thought that emerge checked MD5's on the tbz files it downloads....

[kaltag]

Originally posted by SickBoy


I was gonna say, I thought that emerge checked MD5's on the tbz files it downloads....

Hmm, that's news to me :D then something got messed up somewhere. Stupid old IBM deskstar.

[SickBoy]

I've never seen emerge error out due to a md5 issue, but I do know that I see something about verifying md5's going by during the emerge process. It'd be interesting to test this and see how well emerge handles packages with bad md5's. I am not sure about a way to "break" a tbz but if it can be done and someone can test it on a non-primary box that might be cool.

[Christoph]

It wouldn't be hard to change an md5sum. Just change one bit of the file and the md5sum will be completely different. All the tarballs are in /usr/portage/distfiles.

In my experience, Gentoo is more cutting edge, but also more rough around the edges. I've briefly used FreeBSD, which I liked, although it could learn something from Gentoo (and vice versa, so please don't kill me if you use FreeBSD).
My favorite distro is Debian because of its very reliable stability (recent events (http://lwn.net/Articles/59735/) notwithstanding). Today I've had two *stable* packages fail to emerge with Gentoo, whereas I've only had problems of my own causing with my unstable Debian fileserver. Tweaking is great, and while I'll continue to use Gentoo on my main box, I'd rather have things break because I messed them up.

edit: This must be a special day. apt-get also failed to install a package.

[DarkArctic]

Originally posted by SickBoy
I've never seen emerge error out due to a md5 issue, but I do know that I see something about verifying md5's going by during the emerge process. It'd be interesting to test this and see how well emerge handles packages with bad md5's. I am not sure about a way to "break" a tbz but if it can be done and someone can test it on a non-primary box that might be cool.

I've seen it a few times from corrupted packages that I got from a server. Portage stops the emerge saying that the md5 didn't match what was stored in the portage tree. I think it then asks you to delete it from /usr/portage/distfiles/ and try again. (I haven't seen it in a while)

-DarkArctic